A blog to discuss my experience of being in reunion with my birthfamily for the last twenty-five years. It's about identity and the integration of my life with my birthmother's and the unique blended family that forms as a result.

Thursday, February 26, 2015

This past Christmas, Kate and I had a big blowout. The thing
is, it may have blown out unintended truths from me that I hadn’t known were
there. I'm still trying to sort through them, so my blogs will be in parts as I go through it. This is part 1.

~~~~~

Family is a complicated thing. More complicated for those of
us adopted and in reunion. My mother chose to give me to another family, to be
raised as their child. For better or for worse, that became my truth. My
adopted family was all that I knew. At that moment of exchange, my birthmother
and my original families ceased to exist. With no tie to the past, I only had
the present.

Fast-forward eighteen years. I am the same child, now grown,
and my world looks much like it did when I first became aware of my
surroundings – I had my mom and dad, my brother, my childhood home, my friends,
my neighborhood, my life. My world was solid, as real as the nose on my face.

I had known I was adopted since I was five. Finding out I
was adopted didn’t change anything about my life. I still had my mom, my dad,
my brother, my world. It just added a tidbit of information to it. It was like finding out my adoptive mother
was half German. Interesting maybe, but of little relevance in the day to day.

I thought it would be interesting to find my birthparents,
to know where I came from. So I did.

And that changed everything.

Everything I knew about my life, my world, was a lie. I
wasn’t a quarter German, I was half Polish. Suddenly, that mattered to me.

The original family I had been born into, and then removed
from, was a large family of musicians, artists and adventurers. My grandfather
had graduated from Harvard – or Yale – I forget which. They were boat people
who enjoyed playing music.

The family I was put into was a small family of
second-generation Irish immigrants. My dad was the first of his family to
graduate college. They were more middle-class with working class values of a
traditional family where my dad earned a living and my mom raised the kids. They
were city people who enjoyed fancy dinners, wit and theater.

Neither family was better or worse, but they were decidedly
different. Now, somehow, I belonged to them both (with more on the way when I
would meet my birthfather ten years later).

My birthmother was as much a stranger to me as anyone I would
meet on the street, yet in a moment, we had become blood.

I felt invaded. I would swing between two
extremes. There was euphoria in finally being connected to the earth, having
confirmation that I had really had been born, and to people, and that I was
part of people; and there was panic in the realization that who I was didn’t
exist anymore. I wasn’t that person. I wasn’t this new person either. I was
something in between.

Over the course of the next four years during college I
absorbed the new information from that first meeting and waded into an
interchange with my birthmother through letters, getting to know each other
slowly, manageably.

The four years following that, I plunged into a relationship
with my birthmother by moving across country to live with her and truly get to
know her, and through that, get to know myself.

The years passed and we reached a buoyancy. It wasn’t always
easy, but it was grounded. She was now part of my life. She wasn’t my mother,
she was “Kate,” and that meant something, if only to me. I couldn’t explain
what she was to me, but she was important to me. She would call me daughter,
even though I wouldn’t call her mother, and that seemed to be okay, a kind of
hard-won compromise.

We lived in the same town, and had our own lives, but were a
part of each other’s lives. It had evolved into a normalcy that we felt it
would be good to share our story with others who were new in reunion, or those
who wondered about the effects of adoption, or people who struggled with their
identity, or were trying to make up for past losses.

We’ve been writing our story for many years now, but I’m
finding it’s still evolving, and change is hard.

Reunion is complicated. Even now, 25 years later. I don't know why it's still hard to sort out my feelings around it, but things flare up and it becomes clouded. I have to sort through it.